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I want to lead your eyes on a slow pilgrimage
Toward those distances of suffering, alas! where since when,
Since what days of old, my heart has wintered!
It is my land of immensity,
Where nothing grows but nothingness,
Beaten by rain and great wind.
It is my land of long shroud.
My rivers make slow serpents
Of yellow water across great stretches
Of flat and creeping terrain.
It is my land without a single fold, not one,
It is my land of great shroud.
A few rare herons, on the edge of false marshes,
A few poor herons, in their scissor beaks,
Twist, at nightfall, worms and toads.
And sometimes a few flights of distant crows
With great tatters of wings, grind their hatreds
At the four corners of the long plains.
It is my land of immensity,
Where my old heart, gloomy and demented,
Beaten by rain and great wind,
Like silt, molders sleeping.
My villages in the clear light – since what time? –
And my bells toward departing vessels
And my yards and my exulting masts
They are at the bottom – since what time? –
Of leaden estuaries and shallow pond bottoms?
My villages of childhood and pride,
My villages of joy and towers of pride,
They have sunk – since what evenings? –
Of copper equinoxes in black skies?
It is my land of immensity
Where nothing grows but nothingness
Beaten by rain and great wind.
The always uniformity of days
Lowers in me the slightest effort
Raised, whether toward life or toward death.
No longer even to cry out – but to stagnate there always
Like a corpse in gold on a prow
In slime and mud;
No longer even to feel this pain
Heroic of one’s misfortune;
Nothing – but the hand of one’s rancor,
Extending a today of gloomy
Heart, toward a tomorrow that will be gloomy too,
The same as yesterday – and which always like today
Will extend gloomy and gloomier still
The next day toward the other dawn.
It is my land of immensity,
Where nothing grows but nothingness,
Beaten by rain and great wind,
Around which turn the iron ennui
And the mechanisms of winter nights.
And the yawns of stars and the black skies
In mourning for so many evenings
For piles of years
Of agglutinated habits.
And shall I always be the buried one
Of these moors of immense oblivion?
The one for whom these flights of hatreds
At the four corners of the long plains,
Grind since what times, their cries always the same?
The one whose herons, at night,
Whose lean herons, upright on the dune,
Swallow, in moonlit midnights,
Immensely, the worms and the beasts of ennui.
And now your eyes know these distances of shore
Where my so gloomy heart, alas! – and since when? –
Since what days of old winters.
Emile Verhaeren
Translation generated by Poésies 123 with assistance from the deepseek-chat artificial-intelligence model.
Text published on Poésies 123: https://www.poesies123.com/en/poem-the-plain-i-emile-verhaeren/